The Lessons of What is History?

Abstract

It is not for his monumental A History of Soviet Russia that E.H. Carr is best known today but for two less ambitious works. Thus no introductory course in international relations seems to be complete without The Twenty Years’ Crisis, often included to represent, dubiously, something called ‘classical realism’. Meanwhile, most historians in the Anglophone world and a substantial number elsewhere read What is History? (1961, henceforth WIH) as graduate students and probably go on to teach it to the next generation. Both works, in short, have become classics. The Twenty Years’ Crisis is a canonical text within a field that takes such things quite seriously. WIH, by contrast, is seen as a handy way to open up some basic questions about a discipline which lacks a proper canon and whose boundaries are notoriously diffuse.¹